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CHAPTER 18
In the darkest night, search for and find a star
20 June 1977 pm in Chuang Tzu Auditorium
Anand means bliss, mahamani means the cosmic mind – bliss mind. And all depends on the mind. Ultimately all is our attitude. If we suffer, we suffer because of our wrong attitude, because of our wrong mind. Because we have created a mind which suffers, because we have cultivated a suffering mind, we suffer. If we create a bliss-mind, bliss follows. Ultimately everything can be reduced to your attitude, to your approach. The same thing can be a source of suffering or of bliss: it depends on how you interpret it.
So remember not to go on interpreting negatively; start interpreting positively. Even in the darkest night go on searching for and finding a star; it is always there. In fact millions of stars are there, and the darker the night, the more they are there, the more brilliant they are. Don’t look at the darkness, look at the stars, and then you will see the darkness is not against the stars. It gives a contrast; it is complementary. That’s why in the day you cannot see the stars: the day is against them. The night is not against them, the night is in total support. Death is in support of life.
So never look for the wrong; if you look it is there. If you look too much in darkness and look for the darkness, stars start disappearing, and then there is only darkness and gloom and suffering and hell – and you have created it!
If you look at the stars, by and by it is not only that you see the stars; by and by the meaning of the darkness is transformed too. You start looking at darkness as something beautiful, something that allows the stars to be. Then the darkness becomes the very mother of the stars.
And that life that can see darkness as the very mother of light, that consciousness that can see nothingness as the source of all, that can see the thorns as protection for the rose, is religious.
Then those thorns are just servants – serving the rose, helping the rose to be there; they are not against it, they are not enemies.
Once you start looking at the positive, all negativity disappears..The things are still the same but a new gestalt arises in the mind, a new pattern. That pattern is what religion is, and this is my message in your name.
[Osho explains the meaning of prem sambodhi – love enlightenment. Enlightenment is coming to a state where no darkness exists, when the dark night is over. And it is going to be through love, that light is going to happen through love. So be more loving, singing, dancing, chanting: these are helpful things on the path of love. Bring more and more love into your life, he says. Let that be your religion and enlightenment will follow. When love becomes very very dense, a light is created. So go on becoming more and more intense in love and you will see by and by that love itself starts becoming a light within you.]
Veerendra. It means divine courage. Deva means divine, veerendra means courage. And that’s exactly what is needed; for everybody it is needed. We all live like cowards. We have been brought up to live like cowards; we have been conditioned to be cowardly. We have been taught always to think first of security, safety, and only then to take any step. And the ultimate result is: we never take any step, we never move into any adventure... and god is the greatest adventure there is! Going to the moon is not so dangerous, going to everest is not such a problem, but going withinwards is.
That is where the unknown is not only the unknown but becomes the unknowable... and the mind simply feels tremendously frightened of the unknowable. It can deal with knowledge, with the known it is very very skilful. It can even deal with the unknown because the unknown can be transformed into the known any moment, but when it comes to deal with the unknowable the mind is utterly at a loss. Then it simply refuses to move a single inch: it says ‘no’.
The first preference is for the known. If you insist and force it too much it can move towards the unknown, but to the unknowable it simply says an absolute’no’... and that’s where courage is needed. And unless we know the unknowable – which is a contradiction in terms but that is the only way to express it – when we come to know the unknowable, only then have we come to know ourselves... because our very being is made of the unknowable stuff: god itself.
So I would like to give you a special meditation that you can do before you come back again. This is a buddhist meditation; the method is to penetrate the unknowable. So each day, sit silently, close the doors, put off the phone, and tell everybody that for one hour you are dead to the world – whatsoever happens: even if the house catches fire you are not going to come out.
Take a shower, have loose clothes if it is too cold to have no clothes on, otherwise be naked, and sit down; this way will be perfectly good (he is sitting relaxedly with his legs crossed). If this feels a little strenuous and difficult then you can sit on a chair. To be comfortable is the point, so that you can remain in that posture for one hour at least.
Then close your eyes, relax the body, and start destroying your relationships. Think: if you are not the son of your father, then who are you? – disconnect it. This is part of your identity, that you are the son of a certain man; disconnect it.
Think: if you are not the husband of your wife, then who are you? – disconnect it. If you are not a father to your children, then who are you? – disconnect it. If you are not a friend to your acquaintances, then who are you? – disconnect it. If you are not the citizen of the united states, then who are you? – disconnect it. And go on disconnecting whatsoever you can find: all kinds of connections are there, all kinds of relationships are there. You belong to a certain church, you belong to a certain country, you belong to this, you belong to that club, you are a professor, you are a therapist, doctor, this and that; go on disconnecting.
For twenty minutes work hard to disconnect all relationship – you are left floating in the unknown – and then ask ‘who am l?’ Now those answers won’t do – that you are a son of a certain man or the husband or the father... your job, your education. We have disconnected them already... we are finished with them! Now there is no way to fall upon those relationships.
With those relationships has disappeared your so-called identity: the way you have come to know yourself, the way that you have become. Once that known is destroyed you are suddenly floating in an unknown ocean. Your mind will try to make this unknown ocean known again; it is still not the unknowable.
From the known you have moved to the unknown. Your mind says ‘Yes, you are not this, you are not that – you are a soul, you are consciousness, you are awareness’, but these are again the trap of the mind. So forget all these things also, drop them! You don’t know.
Buddha says you are an awareness, but who knows? – he may be cheating. And these buddhas are not reliable people at all. Somebody has told you that you are a soul – you are not the body; but you don’t know that yourself. Unless you know it is not worth anything. Somebody has told you that you are an immortal soul and that when you die you will go to god, but this is all rubbish, told by others. It maybe so, it may not be so; you cannot be certain about it.And if you cannot be certain
about it, it has to be discarded.
We are in search of something indubitable, we are in search of something very foundational and essential which cannot be discarded by any effort. So first deny the known, then deny the unknown, and then you start entering into the emptiness of the unknown.
It will be frightening for a few days, it will be almost like a death – it is called in zen, ‘the great death’ – but after a few days, if you go on gathering courage and entering it, within three, four weeks, one day it will suddenly be there. Suddenly all has disappeared; you are no more here. You are no more the same person: a new gestalt has arisen.
Nothing can be said about it; you will have to experience it. Only experience is the proof of it, and only by experience one knows it; there is no other way to know it. So continue this.
Even if for a few seconds that feeling of the unknowable arises, that will doeven if for a single
moment in one hour’s time you enter into that world of nothingness, of nobodiness, of no-self, what zen people call anatta, non-ego. It is pure emptiness, no boundaries; the drop has simply disappeared into the ocean.
Sometimes it will be very hard in the beginning: you will start perspiring and your heart will palpitate and you will feel very uneasy and restless. Don’t be worried – within three weeks all that settles, and once it has settled things start becoming smooth and something starts flowering inside you.
And I can see, it is waiting there like a bud, ready to flower any moment. A little climate just has to be created for it. Mm? – now you have to be a very very careful gardener: this flower of being is ready to flowerAnd courage will be needed, courage is the only need.
If you ask me the definition of a religious person, I don’t say that he has to be virtuous, nonot
necessarily so. But I say that he has to be courageous, necessarily so. Courage is the greatest virtue and the basic virtue; all other virtues follow it: they come like shadows, as consequences.
So this will be your name: swami deva veerendra. Get in tune with it and forget the old. Mm? – it is finished!
Prem means love and prama means knowledge – love knowledge, knowledge that comes through love. There are a few kinds of knowledge: one knowledge that comes through intellect, head, logic, and another kind of knowledge that comes through loving, through feeling, through the heart. The second kind of knowledge is the real knowledge; the first kind is only called so; it is not real knowledge. It is very very indirect, it goes about and about: it never goes directly to the heart of the thing. It is not immediateit is from the outside.
You can study a man from the outside, you can study everything about the man from the outside – his height, his weight, his heartbeat, cardiograph, pulse, blood, urine – you can examine everything but still you will be missing the real man.
If you fall in love with this man you will not know what his cardiograph is, what his pulse rate is, you will not know his chemistry and physiology – but you will know him. Love simply goes direct into the being of the man.and you will come to know him in a totally different way. Mm? – that is the way a
mother knows a child, a lover knows a beloved, a friend knows a friend.
The same kind of knowledge is possible with existence itself. That’s what prayer is: it is an effort to know existence through love.…
[A sannyasin returning to the West says she’s excited about it, and scared too]
Both are good! Excitement always brings the other thing also. Excitement also brings a certain kind of fear in the wake of it. That’s why people don’t get too excited; they pull it down, they repress it. It brings all kinds of emotions. With excitement you will feel more sensuous, more sexual, more fearful, more loving, more angry, everything!
Excitement suddenly brings energy to all kinds of emotions. It is like a flood; it makes you alive.
Hence people love to be excited and are always afraid too, so they only go in little doses: they only go so far and then they stop. But excitement is life. That is the only difference between a dead body and an alive man: the alive man can get excited and the dead man cannot, that’s the only difference.
Excitement is the very nature of life. One has to learn how to be excited and yet remain harmonious, silent, at ease, at rest. Excited and yet at rest: that is the highest harmony that has to be achieved. But it cannot be achieved by destroying excitement; that’s what people have done. They try to remain at ease, and their method is to destroy excitement. Then you are at ease – but you are dead too!
So I am all for excitement and yet I will insist that one go on remaining silent at the same time. There is excitement all around; and at the centre, at the centre of the cyclone, everything is calm and quiet and collected and nothing disturbs it. When this silence goes together with all the sound and the fury and the noise and the dance of excitement, when they are together, balancing each other, then there is beauty. It is beatific.
So don’t stop the excitement: let it go, let it go to the very end. Let it be to the very excess, yet remain more and more alert, see what is happening; watch it as if you are standing outside it. That is the very meaning of the word ‘excite’: it means it is outside you. It is not inside you, it cannot be; the innermost core is never involved.
A zen master was passing across a river, a small river, and his disciple was asking a few questions. When they were crossing the river the disciple asked a question, saying ‘Master, what is the way to cross the river?’
And the master said ‘Cross it in such a way that the water does not touch your feet’.
The disciple was very surprised because he looked down and even the master’s feet were wet! So he said ‘Sir, excuse me, but I see that even your feet are wet.’
And the master said ‘I am not: it is only on the surface. Deep inside I am as dry as ever; the water has not touched me.’
Now, there are two ways to remain untouched by the water: one is, never to enter into any river – but that will be suicidal because the whole life is the river; then you are hung-up on the bank. That’s what happens to your so-called saints in the monasteries and to monks and people – catholics and hindus and jainas. They are just dead, just hanging on the bank, always afraid that if they get into the river they will get wet. That is not the way... that is what is called ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’. You have thrown your life also just because of the fear that you will get wet.
Get into the river, go in as deep as possible, and become a lotus. Cross all kinds of rivers and enjoy all kinds of experiences. East and west, here and there and everywhere, meet all kinds of people, fall in all kinds of love, enter all kinds of madnesses, have. a taste of everything that is available in life... and yet remain a lotus. Be watchful so that inside remains always alone, far away, a watcher on the hills. It will happen; it will start happening by and by.…
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